Pop-up notification

Pop-up notifications, also called toastings, passive pop-ups, desktop notifications, notification bubbles, rustings, balloon notifications or simply notifications, are a way to communicate certain events to users of a graphical user interface without forcing them to react to this notification immediately, unlike conventional pop-up windows. Desktop notifications usually disappear automatically after a short amount of time. Often their content is then stored in some widget that allows the users to access past notifications at a more convenient time.

Support on different systems

In Windows XP, Microsoft introduced balloon help-like passive pop-up notifications, tied to the notification area of the task bar. In Windows Vista and later, notifications get queued when user is away or screensaver is running, and get shown when the user resumes activity. They remain on screen for nine seconds while fading out if the user appears to ignore them.^[1] Microsoft also adopted similar notifications for its other software such as Windows Phone, Internet Explorer 7 and later, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Desktop notifications are a proposed standard for freedesktop.org^[2] but all the major desktop environments running on the X Window System already support this standard, making them pretty reliably available on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Google adopted the concepts of notification drawer^[3] and toast popup messages^[4] for user notifications as basic components of its Android operating system.

As of 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X provides desktop notifications via Notification Center. Previous versions of OS X have no built-in desktop notification feature; however, Growl is a popular application that provides similar functionality and enjoys broad support from third party software.^[5] iOS also includes Notification Center as of iOS 5.

Capabilities

While passive pop-ups do not require any user interaction, some implementations still provide a way for the user to optionally interact with the pop-up. This is called actions. For the Freedesktop specification, this is an optional feature that clients cannot rely on and its use is discouraged by some design guidelines.^[6]

Android adds the ability to provide actions with Jelly Bean.^[7]

External links

• Ubuntu's NotifyOSD notification implementation

References

v t e GUI widgets Command input Button Context menu Menu Pie menu Data input-output Checkbox Combo box Cycle button Drop-down list Grid view List box List builder Radio button Scrollbar Slider Spinner Search box Text box Informational Balloon help Heads-up display in computing Heads-up display in video games Icon Infobar Label Loading screen Progress indicator Progress bar Splash screen Throbber Sidebar Status bar Toast Tooltip Containers Accordion Disclosure widget Frame/Fieldset Menu bar Panel Ribbon Tab Toolbar Window Navigational Address bar Breadcrumb Hyperlink Tree view Special windows About box Alert dialog box Dialog box File dialog Inspector window Modal window Palette window Related concepts Layout manager Look and feel Mouseover Widget toolkit WIMP